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The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 17.0597 Monday, 26 June 2006
[1] From: V. K. Inman <
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Date: Friday, 23 Jun 2006 18:09:26 -0400
Subj: Re: SHK 17.0588 Shakespeare and Islam
[2] From: Jeff Dailey <
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Date: Friday, 23 Jun 2006 18:37:23 EDT
Subj: Re: SHK 17.0588 Shakespeare and Islam
[3] From: Brian Gatten <
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Date: Saturday, 24 Jun 2006 01:30:31 -0500
Subj: RE: Shakespeare and Islam
[4] From: Imtiaz Habib <
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Date: Saturday, 24 Jun 2006 20:26:25 -0400
Subj: Re: SHK 17.0588 Shakespeare and Islam
[1]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: V. K. Inman <
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Date: Friday, 23 Jun 2006 18:09:26 -0400
Subject: 17.0588 Shakespeare and Islam
Comment: Re: SHK 17.0588 Shakespeare and Islam
Cary DiPietro wrote: ...Shakespeare's possible encounters with or
understanding of Islam, especially in the early to mid-1590s? I also
wonder how Edward Said's argument about Orientalism as an enabling
discourse of European colonialism might be read back to a play such as
_Titus_ and in light of the play's own treatment of Roman Empire?
Response: I don't think you can read 'orientalism' back into Shakespeare.
See: Scarfe Beckett, Katharine. _Anglo-Saxon Perceptions of the Islamic
World._ Cambridge University, 2003.-makes an argument that Said's thesis
is not applicable prior to the eighteenth century by citing sources
indicative of European views on Islam.
Page 23: "Yet however far and in whatever direction one manages to
pursue the argument for medieval Orientalism, it does not quite ring
true. Perhaps it is because it lacks the teleological thrust of Said's
Orientalism. All western commentary on the lands of the East tended for
Said towards the last confident act of imperial, colonial rule, the
consequences of which we now face. Individual studies of earlier
periods suggest that things were often more complicated than that. But
while this may detract from the momentum of Said's thesis, it does not
touch the period in which he is secure, between the eighteenth century
and the present day, where, indeed, his argument achieves most
conviction by integrating the long-lived notions embodied in the
literature of the day with the political motivation and material desires
which also characterised this period.
V. K. Inman
[2]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: Jeff Dailey <
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Date: Friday, 23 Jun 2006 18:37:23 EDT
Subject: 17.0588 Shakespeare and Islam
Comment: Re: SHK 17.0588 Shakespeare and Islam
For a brief survey of Elizabethan contacts with Islam, although not
focusing on Shakespeare, you may wish to see my article "Christian
Underscoring in _Tamburlaine the Great, Part II_, in _The Journal of
Religion and Theatre_, available at
http://www.rtjournal.org/vol_4/no_2/dailey.html
In preparing this article, I encountered a great deal of source
material, which I will be happy to share.
Jeff Dailey
[3]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: Brian Gatten <
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Date: Saturday, 24 Jun 2006 01:30:31 -0500
Subject: RE: Shakespeare and Islam
I'm not sure if this is in the direct line of Cary DiPietro's questions,
but Nabil Matar makes an interesting claim in _Turks, Moors, and
Englishmen in the Age of Discovery_, that 16th and 17th century
Englishmen were fairly likely to come face-to-face with a North African
at some point in their lives, and that they were actually more likely to
meet a Muslim than a Jew. He also argues that the infamous Elizabethan
confusion in the definition of "Moor" stems from more or less conscious
political motives. I happen to have a quote handy from a paper I wrote
a while back, so I'll let Matar speak for himself:
"[T]he conflation of North Africans with sub-Saharans is misleading
because England's relations with sub-Saharan Africans were relations of
power, domination, and slavery, while relations with the Muslims of
North Africa and the Levant were of anxious equality and grudging
emulation.... Precisely because the Muslims were beyond colonial reach,
Britons began to demonize, polarize, and alterize them. In a frenzy of
racism and bigotry that dominated the late Elizabethan, Jacobean, and
Caroline periods, dramatists and travelers, theologians, and polemicists
created the representations that would define early modern Britain's
image of the Muslims.... The "Turk" was cruel and tyrannical, deviant,
and deceiving; the "Moor" was sexually overdriven and emotionally
uncontrollable, vengeful, and religiously superstitious. The Muslim was
all that an Englishman and a Christian was not; he was the Other with
whom there could only be holy war." (Matar 7-8, 12-13)
I believe Jack D'Amico made a similar argument earlier in _The Moor in
English Renaissance Drama_, but I can't rattle off any quotes from that
one.
This is my first post to the SHAKSPER list, by the way, so I'll cut it
off before (hopefully) my excitement leads me to say anything embarrassing.
-Brian Gatten
[4]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: Imtiaz Habib <
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Date: Saturday, 24 Jun 2006 20:26:25 -0400
Subject: 17.0588 Shakespeare and Islam
Comment: Re: SHK 17.0588 Shakespeare and Islam
Nabil Matar, and Daniel Vitkus, have written on this area. Perhaps my
own essay, "Shakespeare's Spectral Turks" will also be useful.
Imtiaz Habib
Associate Professor of English
Old Dominion University
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